Mayor Bloomberg tried to get Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to suppress news that two men had been arrested for allegedly trying to swipe more than $400,000 from the mayor’s personal bank account – but the DA refused, The Post has learned.

It was Corporation Counsel Michael Cardozo who delivered the message to Morgenthau that the mayor “doesn’t want this out” after the DA called Tuesday to give him a heads-up about the upcoming press release.

But Morgenthau, the city’s longest-serving DA, refused to buckle.

“I told him [Cardozo] I could not comply,” the DA recalled yesterday.

“When somebody’s charged with a crime and arraigned on that charge, we tell the in-house press. We don’t conduct star-chamber proceedings. We think the public has a right to know who’s charged with a crime.”

Bloomberg took a potshot at Morgenthau on Thursday for releasing the information, saying, “It must have been a quiet news cycle.”

Yesterday, on his weekly WABC radio show, the mayor again questioned “why it got out now” when the theft attempts had occurred months earlier, one in May and one in June.

Morgenthau said it was standard practice for his office to make announcements when suspects are arrested and arraigned, not before.

“We didn’t try to make a big balloon out of this,” he said. “We didn’t call the TV stations. We just did it with the people [reporters] stationed here.”